Tariro
By Prince Gora
This story is fictional. Any relations with real life events may be or may not be coincidental.
Ruvimbo’s wicked eyes pierced every inch of my wasted body from her Mercedes Benz as I handed her a bunch of bananas from my vending stall.
“You were so good in high school, what happened to you Tariro,” she smirked. Ruvimbo had never really liked me in high school mainly because she was not half the student that I was. I was good, good partly because of my God-given intelligence but mostly because I worked hard.
Whenever she came across me studying back then, she always made it a point to sneer in my ear that education in this country doesn`t pay and that in the end, her connections would take her to places that I could only dream of, no matter how hard I worked.
I knew her sneers were a product of jealous and didn`t give them much attention. I had always believed that a day would come when my hard work would pay off and force her to take back her words but here we were, witnessing the fulfillment of her prophetic words.
“Life happened,” I replied simply and sat back on my cardboard stool behind my vending stall.
Mai Chido who had a vending stall next to mine was perplexed and as Ruvimbo drove away, she asked me a simple but direct question.
“What was that about, Tary?”
“I know this lady from high school. We went together to boarding school for four years.” I was trying with all that I have to politely cut short the conversation as soon as possible.
“That lady said you were good in school, shouldn`t you be driving a car like hers? What happened? Did you fall pregnant and get chased out of school before your exams?” Mai Chido should probably have been a police officer or journalist and not a vendor. She is an expert on how to get on one`s nerves and get them talking.
“It`s a long story Mai Chido…”
“Well, we have got the whole day here so tell me about it,” she interjected.
***
I didn`t want to talk about school or even think about it because the thing I remember most about school is the day that my mother looked at me admirably with glowing eyes from the back of the tent as I exited the stage and walked slowly towards her at the graduation ceremony. She was beaming.
“You have done it my daughter, you have made mommy proud,” she whispered to my right ear as she pulled me into a tight hug when I finally reached her. She had just watched on with teary eyes as the President, in his role as the chancellor of our university, capped me with the cap of knowledge.
Words alone cannot explain how overjoyed we were that day. For close to two decades, we had been working and building towards this goal. Now, mom`s decades of sacrifices and my years of hard work were not only coming to an end but had also paid off handsomely. It was, at long last, time for celebration and celebrate is what we did.
Had we known what the future had in store for me then, we probably would not have celebrated that much.
“I am listening Tary, are you going to talk or not?” Mai Chido persisted.
“I didn`t fall pregnant and I passed my exams,” I finally replied her first question after close to half a dozen minutes of deep pondering.
“And then what happened?”
“I went to university.”
“So you are a graduate?”
“Not that it is helping my life in any significant way Mai Chido.” I had long learnt the art of downplaying my academic credentials so that I can fit better in the street hustles.
Mai Chido was determined to hear the story of my life and she wasn`t going to stop until she had heard it so I told her about my graduation day. How happy I was that day and how much my mom and I had celebrated.
I also told her how, on graduation day, we even forgot that we had heard the story, the story that said that there were no jobs in the country and graduates were languishing in poverty.
My lecturers had long dismissed those fears and affirmed that the market for jobs was still widely open. “It is only those that have graduated with the lowest degree class that are finding it difficult to find jobs out there,” the head of our department repeatedly told our class and many others. He was a professor, older, more educated and presumably wiser than us so we chose to take his word for it and worked even harder to get good grades.
Years later, when I was beginning to get tired of job hunting, I often wondered if he had, perhaps conveniently, forgotten to add that the jobs market was open for those well connected only.
My time on internship had given me a rough idea of what it was like out there in the industry and sent me a strong warning. But again, I had chosen to dismiss that warning too. Although, in my defense, I can point out to the fact that my attachment period came right at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Once things stabilized, I believed, job hunting would surely get better.
Except that when I ultimately graduated and the danger posed by the coronavirus waned, things didn`t get any better for the likes of me.
Most of my classmates who were well connected got jobs before the ink on their graduation certificates was even dry. That gave me hope. It was doable, I thought.
So I kept on sending one Curriculum Vitae after another to any company that exhibited the slightest sign of being a possible employer. Before long, it began to feel like I had already spent my first three months` future salary on the printing and delivering of resumes; resumes that seldom generated so much as a, “we regret to inform you that ...,” reply.
Hitherto, I had never really cared much about things like politics, corruption, the economy, connections and stuff like that. My grades and a good behavioral record were supposed to secure me a top paying job at a top company and all these other ‘funny stuff’ didn`t matter.
That was in college, in real life the ‘funny stuff’ mattered.
When I started closely following the news, I made a shocking discovery. A number of notable companies, including multinationals, were either downsizing or out rightly closing their local operations. The news that had been readily available to me until then had been the complete opposite.
Of greater importance to me though is the little research that I embarked on about a year after I started job hunting. I am naturally a very independent woman who likes to travel in the roads less travelled. I was like that in school and even in job hunting. But unlike in school, my job hunting tactics weren`t bearing any fruits.
Desperate to finally get my hands on a job, I got in touch with a guy called Malcom, a friend of a friend, who had recently gotten a job at a mine. My mission was to know how he had done it.
After the usual pleasantries, I put my sweet tongue and quick wit to work. I enquired first about the working environment which Malcom said, to my great surprise, wasn`t very great. He was working 75 meters underground, 10 hours every single day for three consecutive weeks before taking a five days off. The pay was generally fine but way below that expected for an engineer. That led me to pause a bit and be hesitant to make further enquires. In my mind there was no doubt that this was one of the rare moments where a CV had paid off. I couldn`t even bear the thought that a college educated engineer would need the so called connections to get his hands on this job.
I was in for a shock, two shocks actually. It turned out that Malcom had gotten the job through an uncle who worked there and that he wasn`t actually working as an engineer or anything near that there, he was a general hand.
That took some swallowing but I got it. After all, I myself was near that point where you desperately want a job to sustain your living; and by job, I mean literary any type of job.
Next up I got in touch with Nancy, Rudo and Calvin. This was just about a third of my former classmates who had managed to secure employment in the year that had passed since our graduation but there was no need for me to make any further calls. I had already picked a pattern. Maybe some of these people were on their jobs solely based on merit but every single one of them had had a little help from an inside connection. There was a second observation; only one of them, Calvin, was actually doing the job that he had been trained for.
My takeaway from all these conversations with former classmates was obvious and straight forward; and it was not that corruption was rampant in Zimbabwe. I somehow concluded that I needed to join the bandwagon. If you can`t beat them, join them right? Yeah, damn right!
At the time, all I cared about, all that mattered, was finally getting a job somewhere where I could get paid to recoup some of the money spent during my education. And to get a job, I needed to change my job hunting tactics.
Having lost more than a year looking for an engineering job, I didn`t have the luxury to lose any more time so I set to work on my new plan that very evening. Instead of listing prospective employers as I used to do, I came up with a list of prospective connections instead. I also changed my job taste; instead of looking for engineering jobs in particular, I decided to look for any job that paid decently.
It took me a month or so to get connected to a distant uncle who was well connected with a local plastic bottles manufacturing company. The company was apparently looking for a quality control person. My uncle did my bidding from inside the company and the company offered me the position which I took after a little hesitation.
My hesitancy wasn`t coming from the fact that I was about to assume a role that I wasn`t adequately trained for. Far from it. My hesitancy was more about the remuneration offer and the working environment. If I somehow had had the ability to see the future, I would not have hesitated to take the offer, I would have out rightly turned down the opportunity.
My salary, which was pegged in the infamous Zimbabwean dollars, soon proved to be highly unsustainable. Part of this was due to the fact that when I had negotiated for my salary, I hadn`t factored in Zimbabwe`s pay as you earn (PAYE) tax which stood at 20% for my salary bracket at the time. This wiped out what I had assumed to be my budget for transport and lunch. Most significant though was the fact that, for the first time in my life, I came face to face with Zimbabwe`s hyperinflation and cash crisis.
***
The remuneration issue was pretty difficult but I could deal with it. My working environment on the other hand, was nothing like I had ever imagined.
When I turned up for work on the first day, I was shocked to discover that I was only the second female at the facility and the only one (and first one) to be involved with work in the plant. The other woman, a fairly beautiful lady of middle age, was employed as a kitchen attendant.
Straight out of college and unmarried, it was obvious that I was going to attract a lot of unsolicited and unwelcome attention. But I needed to work and get along with work colleagues especially in the plant so I tried to be as polite and as nice as possible.
Unbeknown to me, this gesture and reputation of being a nice and easy going young lady, didn`t sit well with, of all people, my Human Resources (HR) Manager. My resistance to his romantic gestures didn`t help matters either and so barely a month or so into my very first job, he turned my time at the plastic bottles manufacturing plant into a living hell.
His actions did more than that though. They unearthed long buried memories of a college horror I had experienced in my first semester at college.
Before I went to college, my mother had encouraged me to watch the YouTube Documentary called ‘Sex for grades: undercover inside Nigerian and Ghanaian universities.’ The documentary investigates several lecturers who were abusing their power to prey on college girls. It was my mother’s way of preparing me for college. She wanted me to be able to spot questionable advances from lecturers and university staff so that I would be able to stop or report possible sexual harassment or abuse quite early. I had watched that documentary with no idea that I would finish the very first semester of college in a position similar to many of the brave young women featured in that documentary.
I need not get into many of the details of what happened to me in my first year at college because the story has been well documented and is all over the internet. The long and short of it is that the Engineering Drawing Lecturer, Mr. Njikwiwo, told me that I would fail his course if I resisted his sexual advances and also tried to turn me into his pimp.
“What`s a pimp?” Asked Mai Chido. I had thought that she had lost me because she had been quite for close to a quarter of an hour while I narrated my story. I only really continued to tell the story because I needed to hear it too. I needed to say my troubles, past and present, out loud.
“Well, he asked me to scout for female students for him and other lecturers to prey on.”
Mr. Njikwiwo had pressurized me to give him my number several times. When he finally got it against my wish, he pestered me for sexual favors. He repeatedly asked me to come to beer drinking sessions and even once went to the extent of requesting that I abandon my school work so that I can be with him.
Anyways, I resisted all his requests and advances even when he threatened me that he would fail me his course and simply focused on working hard.
I thought he was bluffing but he did fail me his course. That left with no option but to engage the Zimbabwean Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR) who helped me file a case against him with the university.
A hearing was held, I presented all the evidence, including WhatsApp chats and Mr. Njikwiwo was found guilty. It later turned out that this wasn`t the first time that he had been found guilty of preying on students, it had also happened 5 years prior.
But guess what the university did? They simply advised me to report the matter to the police. I mean, what was the point of the hearing then? Still, I had accepted my fate and moved on. But those demons had moved on with me to the workplace.
I stood my ground against the HR`s advances, just as I had done with that predatory lecturer back at university. The only downside this time around was that I didn`t manage to gather enough evidence to nail him. He was much more subtle with his harassment.
The HR Manager continued to make my work life miserable for the two or three months that I continued to work at the manufacturing plant. He even resorted to shameful tactics of putting me consecutively on night shift for a whole month and even accused me of stealing once.
In the end, taking into account my meagre RTGS salary and my dignity, I chose to gracefully quit.
That`s how the graduate became a vendor and a change money dealer. I am not proud of it but I have to survive even if even it`s from hand to mouth.
There are no sexual predators who hold the key to my paycheck in the streets but the council and national police force are such a nuisance. Sadly, the only way to make a living on the streets of Harare is to bribe it off them.
That doesn`t mean that I don`t know that corruption is a cancer deeply engraved in our country and eating through it every day though. I might be making a living off it but I know that it must be and want it to be addressed from the very top office of the country to myself and others living from hand to mouth like me.
***
Mai Chido was stunned. She had listened for half an hour straight while I told her the ordeals of my life and at the end of it all, she was literally speechless.
“Zvakaoma asikana, all along I thought that if I had gone to school things would have been better for me,” she finally whispered ages after I had finished my story.
“Maybe,” I replied quietly. “It all depends on how well connected you are and how much abuse you are willing to tolerate at the workplace.”
“But Mai Chido,” I put on a cheering face for, “we have to remember that there are still some people doing great things without connections or giving sexual favors out there.”
I truly believe that these people, though few they may be, are really out there. That gives me hope. Ndichangoramba ndine tariro sezita rangu!
